118 PHOTOGR.APHY Artzsts and Lovers I NNOCENTLY opening the book "Georgia O'KeefFe, A Portrait," by Alfred Stieglitz, published by the Metropolitan Museum on the oc- casion of Its exhibition of the same pho- tographs, is like taking a little drive in the country and suddenly coming upon Stonehenge The series of fifty-one photographs of O'KeefFe's face, hands, and naked body (selected from a group of ahout five hundred photographs tak- en between 191 7 and 1937, some of which have been shown and repro- duced but never before collected) is Stieglitz's posthumous masterpiece, one of photography's monuments, and a tour de force of offset printing. Stieg- litz was on the whole opposed to any re- printing of his pictures. "My photo- graphs do not lend themselves to re- productIon," he wrote to a publisher in 1 9 31, and went on to explain, "The very qualities that give them their bfe would be completely lost in reproduc- tion. The quality of touch in Its deepest living sense is inherent in my photo- graphs. When that sense of touch is lost, the heartbeat of the photograph is extinct. In the reproduction, it would become extinct-dead. My interest is in the living. That is why I cannot give permission to reproduce my photo- graphs." This letter is quoted in the text that Dorothy Norman wrote for the Stieglitz volume in Aperture's His- tory of Photography series, and the in- adequate reproductions in the book, in- cluding some from the O'KeefFe series, bear out Stieglitz's objection all too well. In amazing contrast, the repro- ductions in the new Metropolitan Mu- seum book (available at the museum, for $35, with a trade edition scheduled for this summer) are near-replicas of Stieglitz's palladio and gelatin-silver prints, somehow retaining the tactility of the originals. Richard Benson, who made the pnnter's negatives, and El- eanor Caponigro, who supervised the printing process, are the persons chief- ly responsible for this impossible-seem- ing feat. A comparison of the original prints in the show with the reproduc- tions in the book revealed only a few tiny discrepancies, and these main- ly in the earliest palladio prints. To this viewer's mind, the occasional small losses in the reproductions were more than made up for by the opportunity for slow, quiet perusal that the book offers and that the crowded museum show (and the crowd-reflecting glass in front of the pnnts) did not. Not since the days of Camera Work has there been sue h a book of photographs. If the quality of the reproductions restored the O'KeefFe pictures to their rightful preëminence in Stieglitz's æuvre, their collective presentation was another act of restoration. O'Keeffe's face is one of the most famous in art. The name immediately evokes the image of the grave, gaunt, enigtnatic woman-neither young nor old but possessed of a sibyl's beautiful, strange, dark, sorrowing agelessness-that Stieg- litz's photographs have etched into the public consciousness, and that by its very vividness has engendered an odd con- fusion between the woman, her art, and the photographs. The art critic Sanford Schwartz has pointed out the influence of the Stieglitz photographs on the pub- lic reception of O'KeefFe's paintIngs; presumably, if an unphotographed non- entity had done the same paintings they would not have achieved the renown they achieved as Georgia O'KeefFe's work. Conversely, if Stieglitz had pho- tographed a Queens housewife rather than America's leading avant-garde woman paInter, the photographs, too, would have been differently regarded. Until the publication of this book, Stieglitz's role in the O'KeefFe photo- graphs was minimal, almost incidental, somewhat akin to that of the shadowy escort of the beautiful model in a fashion photograph. So strong is the identification of O'KeefFe with her photographed likeness that the photo- graphs have seemed to belong among her works rather than among Stieglitz's. The book firmly restores the photo- graphs to their righ tful maker. Seeing them together, in chronological order, as in an artist's retrospective, we are in a position to perceive that our image of Georgia O'KeefFe is an artist's in- vention-the O'KeefFe in the photo- graphs is to the real O'KeefFe what the Saskia in Rembrandt's paintings was to the real Saskia. In this collection, O'KeefFe the famous woman artist re- cedes and Stieglitz the great photogra- pher moves to the forefront The '(por- trait" is a self-portrait. The man who emerges from it is hardly the same Stieglitz-the pomp- ous, sententious, petulant, cold, sexless old maId-who came out of Dorothy Norman's worshipful and naïvely dev- astating biography. The man who took the pictures of O'KeefFe is a person of evident warmth, passion, erotic imagi- nativeness, and assured masculinity. The early pictures in particular-made in the various borrowed studios and apartments where the couple lived be- fore their marriage, in 1924-demon- strate Stieglitz's capacity for love and sex. In her introduction, O'KeefFe, now ninety-one, playfully recalls this period: He began to photograph me when I was about twenty-three. [She was actu- ally about thirty.] When his photographs of me were first shown, it was in a room at the Anderson Galleries. Several men- after looking around awhile-asked Stieglitz if he would photograph their wives or girlfriends the way he photo- graphed me. He was very amused, and laughed about it. If they had known what a close relationship he would have needed to have to photograph their wives or girlfriends the way he photographed me-I think they wouldn't have been in- terested. Weston's nudes, compared to Stieg- litz's, seem almost timid and repressed. One Stieglitz nude, of 1 918 (never be- fore published )-a torso cropped at the chest and mid-thigh-stands out from the rest in its blunt sexualIty. The picture is taken from below, from a gynecologist's vantage point. The mod- el sits with her thighs open, a robe pushed aside to show breasts and stom- ach and pubic hair and labia. Because of the camera's foreshortening angle, O'KeefFe's slender body here assumes a Léger-like squatness and massiveness: the breasts are heavy and pendulous, the pelvis looks broad, the thighs are thick. What gives the picture its tre- mendous erotic impact is, paradoxical- ly, the very thing that saves it from being lewd and unprintable in an art book. The photograph is printed to darken out the particulars of the gen- itals: the dark pubic hair merges with the darkness below and forms an enormous black place at the lower center of the picture which dominates the composition-drags the eye to it- self, as an abyss compels the gaze of the vertiginous into its fathomless dark- ness. The photograph is an "equiva- lent" (to use Stieglitz's term for what he thought a photograph should always be) of a feeling of the time about sex, which reached its apogee in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, as a dark, heavy,